The theme of this year’s meeting was "going on safari" (I assume tied to the San Diego Zoo) so that’s a safari hat on Ricky’s head in case you’re wondering.

This year’s award winners included:

IEEE CPMT Field Award to Dr. Mauro Walker (Motorola – Retired)

As IFTLE has described previously, the Field award is the highest level award in IEEE for any given division, so this is the highest award available in the world for IC packaging. This year’s recipient Mauro Walker has had a long career of accomplishment in the advancement of electronic manufacturing and manufacturing technology in industry, academia and professional societies. His leadership in Motorola in the 1970s and 1980s drove the component packaging miniaturization that was necessary for portable communications such as cell phones pagers and two way radios. He established advanced manufacturing technology centers within Motorola which developed many innovations for high speed surface mount assembly.

He is the previousrecipient of the IEEE’s Special Manufacturing Technology Award and the Society for Manufacturing Engineers’ "Total Excellence in Electronic Manufacturing Award." Walker is an IEEE fellow and founder of the IEEE International Electronic Manufacturing Technology Symposium (IEMT).

Having worked on technology introduction programs with Motorola during this time, I can tell you that this is a well deserved award. There was no one introducing technology like bumping and chip scale packaging into consumer products better or earlier than Motorola in those days. Congrats Mauro!

The Dave Feldman award is for extended and extraordinary leadership in the IEEE CPMT society. It is named after Dave Feldman who was a key player in Bell labs in the 1950 and 60s and started the ECC (the predecessorto ECTC) in 1950. I am humbled to say that this year’s winner was yours truly. After the luncheon, a bright eyed 20 something engineer came up to me and asked exactly what you had to do to win an award like this, i.e what made me stand out from the other folks in a position of leadership in this large organization. He probably expected some quickclicheanswer, but instead I bent his ear with some philosophy. But seriously, the two actions that I am most proud of during my Presidency have to be (1) installing 1 man one vote on a global basis. While Rao Tummala certainly drove the global expansion of the CPMT society during his 4 years, when I took over as President our board of Governors still had a European and an Asian representative which the rest of the US elected body "selected" to represent the non US members. After developing enough internal consensus,I pushed to have non US members select only their own representatives and to have each region represented based on the number of members in those regions. Seems logical enough, but somebody had to actually push to get it done and that was me. FYI - it is no coincidence that our last president was from Germany and our current president is from Hong Kong - we are now truly a global society which was Rao and my original dream. PS - growth in both these areas continues - this year both Europe and Asia representation went up by one BOG member while the US went down by two. (2) the complete ownership of the ECTC. Since I started going to the ECTC in the mid 1980s, I was always confused by the co-ownership (IEEE CPMT and EIA) that existed. As I took over as President this did not clarify itself, but rather became more and more confounding. ECTC was, and is the flagship conference of the CPMT, but it was only partially controlled by our IEEE organization. So my second "quest" was to buy out the EIA. I was not able to conclude this during my term, but after convincing incoming President Bill Chen of the logic in this, we moved forward during his presidency to amicably conclude this transaction. That’s it, although it may seem trivial to you the reader, that’s what I think my lasting stamp on the organization will forever be.

The sustained technical contribution award went to Tseung-Yuen Tseng of National Chiao-Tung Univ in Taiwan where he is University Chair Professor in the Department of Electronics Engineering and the Institute of Electronics. Dr. Tseng’s professional interests are electronic ceramics, nanoceramics, ceramic sensors, high-k dielectric films, ferroelectric thin films and their based devices, and resistive switching memory devices. He has published over 300 research papers in refereed international journals. He invented the base metal multilayer ceramic capacitors, which have become large scale commercial product. Dr. Tseng was elected a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society in 1998, IEEE Fellow in 2002 and MRS-T Fellow in 2009.